Latest revision as of 11:35, 25 March 2024

This page describes the process of submitting tournament results.

Directors of sanctioned NASPA tournaments are responsible for submitting the results promptly to ensure that player records and ratings are kept up to date.

All tournament results must be submitted electronically, and every tournament director is expected to be technically able to do so without assistance. If you are unable to do so, please ask one of your colleagues for help.

To receive your tournament data and rate your tournament, the following things need to happen.

1. There needs to be an entry for your event in the rated tournament database.
2. All of the players in your event need to be current NASPA members.
3. You need to prepare and submit your tournament data.

When the last step is complete, you will be shown your updated NASPA account information, including a new invoice that will have been posted for the participation fee for your tournament. If different NASPA members are to be responsible for submitting rating data and paying the participation fee, you can either include a note with the rating data, or email John Chew to have the invoice transferred to the member responsible for payment. Please also see our webpage on payment terms for a description of current penalties on overdue accounts.

The rated tournament database

The rated tournament database is maintained semi-automatically by John Chew based on the official tournament calendar, updated at the beginning of each calendar month. If you do not see your tournament listed on the rating data submission page or in the tsh LISTT command, it is possible that the wrong codirector has been assigned the responsibility for submitting rating data. Please contact John to have this corrected.

If your tournament has multiple events, such as Early Birds, Late Birds, Night Birds, Lunch Birds and Main Events, each one must have its own entry in the rated tournament database. Please pay close attention to the dates and times when choosing the event whose data you are submitting, to ensure that the events are rated in the correct order.

If your tournament has SOWPODS divisions, those are currently treated as separate events, and must also have their own database entries. If you are preparing to direct a tournament in the SOWPODS rating system, please consult the page on SOWPODS tournaments for additional considerations.

Current NASPA membership

Check to make sure that all of your players are listed in the membership database as unexpired members. A member is expired if their expiry date is earlier than your tournament. If a member's expiry date is 0000-00-00, then they have ordered a membership online, but it has not yet been processed. Rating data will not be accepted if any players are not members.

In order not to delay processing of your rating data, if you have players who want to pay for their memberships through you, or players who say they have recently mailed us membership checks, you should log onto Member Services and use our online membership system to create or renew memberships for them. At the end, when you are asked how you want to pay for their memberships, indicate that you will pay later with your tournament's participation fee. If you do so, the memberships will be activated right away so that you can proceed with submitting rating data. Do not pay by credit card, as this will delay the creation of the memberships until our staff can review the credit card transaction.

In the case where you have players who say that their membership checks are in the mail, we suggest that you ask them for some form of security, such as a replacement membership check that you agree not to cash if we receive the check they mailed. Deduct the amount of any such memberships from the total amount that you remit to us at the end of your tournament; they will remain as outstanding items on your bill, but be removed when we receive the mailed checks.

If however we do not receive the member's mailed check, the charge will remain on your account, and you will not be able to run another sanctioned tournament until you make good their membership fees.

How to upload the results

Instructions vary according to the software that you are using to run your tournament.

Uploading directly from tournament management software

tsh

If you are using tsh, make sure you are connected to the Internet and enter the SUBMIT command. The software uploads the results and redirects you to the payment form for final submission.

Note: you must UPDATE to the current version on or after 2009-07-10 to obtain the above functionality and set the configuration variables director_id and tournament_id to your NASPA ID and your event’s ID (use the LISTTourneys command to find the latter; you can alternately go to Submit Rating Data in Member Services, look for your tournament in the popup menu and see the number next to it). If you use an older version, the network commands will be unable to connect to the correct website and report an error. As an additional benefit of updating, the USERATINGS command will warn you if any of your players are not current members, or have memberships which will expire within the next seven days.

If you are unable to use the SUBMIT command (e.g., because you are not online, have a firewall, are running a very old version of Windows), run the SUBMIT command, ignore any error messages, then look in your event folder for a file called all.tsh. You can submit this file manually as described below.

If your tournament will also be rated by WESPA, please note that the value of your 'event_name' configuration option will be passed on to the WESPA rating officer instead of the default city and state/province.

Uploading a text file through the tournament data submission application

Save the results in a text file as instructed in one of the following subsections. Use one text file per event.

Go to Member Services in the sidebar at left. Log on, if necessary. If you are registered as a NASPA director, you will see a button labelled Submit Ratings. If your event is registered in the tournament schedule, you will be able to choose it from a menu. Do so, select the file you are going to upload, and submit it. If there are inconsistencies in your data, or nonmembers among your players, you will be asked to correct the situation and resubmit. When you have successfully submitted your data, you will be directed to a payment screen. If you are submitting data for more than one event (e.g., if you have an Early Bird), you may wait until you have submitted all your data before making payment. If you have trouble, contact John Chew.

Director!

The author of the Director! program has asked that we not post instructions on submitting NASPA rating data using his program. Since there are however NASPA directors who need to do so, and who frequently encounter difficulty doing so, please note that NASPA requires that player names in rating data files be spelled exactly the way they are in our database. Director! sometimes alters the order of the words in a player's name, so if you see an error message saying that one of your players is not a NASPA member, you may need to save a rating data file, and edit it with WordPad (or NotePad) before submitting the file through Member Services.

To do so, one Director! user suggests "When you click the option Wrapup->Generate NASPA Results File, it generates and displays the file to you in a dialog box - the name of the file is at the bottom of the page. There are buttons on the dialog to Verify Membership and Upload to NASPA." and adds that the file will be stored in C:\Program Files\Director!\Data.

Another user has informed us that if you are using a recent version, you can also ask it for a pairings list, then edit the player's name directly in the list, before resubmitting the rating data.

Connie Creed helpfully adds that if you have a player whose name has three parts, including an ordinal suffix, such as PUBLIC JOHN Q IV, you have to enter his "Director! last name" as "PUBLIC" and his "Director! first name" as "JOHN Q, IV".

TourneyMan

If you are using TourneyMan, use the “Save for Chew” menu item to create a file whose name ends in “.CHW”, and then upload the file.

TourneyMan has limits on the lengths of player names. If you are trying to submit results for an event that included Verna Richards Berg, TourneyMan will omit the “s” in “Richards”. Use a text editor such as NotePad to restore the “s” before uploading the “.CHW” file.

If you have used two or more data files to run your event and need to combine them into one to submit your data, use WordPad to edit them together into the file described below under No Software.

TMENU (TurnMenu)

If you are using TMENU, use the “Copy computer data to a Disk” command and choose the Format “NSA crosstable disk”. Make sure you choose the option to include game scores in the output. Then upload the file.

For example, if a player ("Bob") rated 1570 is allowed to play in a division for players rated 1600 and up, while another player ("Fred") rated 1580 chooses not to play up, enter "Bob's" rating as 1600 so he will be ranked above "Fred".

Other software

If you are using other software, please contact the Web Committee to have its instructions posted here.

Software developers should contact John Chew for details of a richer data format recommended for automatic generation of result submissions, and for instructions about using NASPA's RESTful API.

No software

If you are using no software to run your tournament, you should prepare an ASCII text file (not a Word document or a Unicode text file) (if using Notepad, choose Encoding:ANSI using the pulldown menu beside the Save button). It should look as follows, and you should upload it when it is ready.

 #division A
 #ratingcheck off
 Chew, John, III:CM000003   1800 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300
 Edley, Joe   2000 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 0 300 400
 Butts, Alfred 500 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 300
 Winter 1900 0 0 0 0 0 3; -50 -50 -50 -50 -50 500
 #division B
 Doe, John 1500 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300
 Doe, Jane 1400 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 50 300 400
 Doe, Kate 1300 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 50
 #division C
 Sherman, Joel:AA000999 2000 3 0 2 3 0 2; 300 50 350 300 50 300
 Wapnick, Joel:AA000386 2000 0 3 1 0 3 1; 50 300 350 50 300 400
 Horn, Joel:AA000172 1800 1 2 0 1 2 0; 400 400 50 400 400 50

Here is how to read the above.

• If there is data for more than one division in the data file, each new division should begin with a line that consists of “#division”, a space, and the division name. The division name should not include a space. (As of 2010-04-18 you may also run everything together in one division, which will be automatically separated according to closed pairing groups.)
• If the input ratings in the data file do not match the currently posted NASPA ratings, adding the line “#ratingcheck off” will suppress error messages.
• The player data for each division must appear on consecutive lines. Spaces (blanks) must be inserted where described below, and additional spaces may be added between syntactic elements for clarity or aesthetics.
• Within a division, the players may be listed in any order (you may want to keep the list ordered by player number; there is no need to order it by final standings).
• Each line begins with the following elements:
  • a player’s last name
  • a comma
  • a space
  • the player’s first name (if a player has only one name, omit this and the preceding comma and space)
  • optionally, a comma followed by the player’s generational suffix (Jr, Sr, II, III, IV, V, etc.), if any
  • optionally, a colon followed by the player’s NASPA id (AA... or CM...)
  • a space
  • the player’s input rating (or 0 for previously unrated players).
• After this come a list of pairing numbers (each number preceded by a space) indicating who the player played in each round, from the first round to the last. A pairing number of 0 indicates that the player had an unrated bye or forfeit; a pairing number of n means that the player’s opponent was the nth player listed in the division.
• After the pairing numbers comes a semicolon and the player’s scores in each round (each number preceded by a space), again from the first to the last. If a player had a bye or forfeit, the score should be the player’s spread for that round, typically +50 or −50.

We do also support, but do not encourage new directors to use, older data formats. If you are used to using an older format to submit NSA results, please feel free to continue to keep using it with NASPA results. Player’s NASPA id (following the first name, separated by a colon) can optionally be added to the old format files.

Payment

Our various payment options are summarized on our Payment page.

When you submit your ratings data, an invoice will be added to your member account, and you can make online payments toward it using major credit cards through the Member Services link. The former NSA payment system is now deactivated. Here is a link to member services:

http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/services.pl

If your tournament has different people responsible for submitting rating data and paying participation fees, please email John Chew after the rating data is submitted, to have the charge transferred from the submitter’s NASPA account to your treasurer’s account.

If you cannot pay by credit card online, you can mail your check for participation fees in U.S. funds payable to NASPA to:

NASPA
48 FLAMEHILL RD
LEVITTOWN PA 19056
USA

Submitting payment by mail will not delay rating of your event.

The participation fee is $.50 per person per game for all rated tournaments (club tournaments as well), not including byes or forfeits.

Submission Timeline

Many directors submit tournament data on the day on which a tournament ends, almost all do so by the end of the following day, and this is the level of service that players expect. If the Rating Officer (currently John Chew) is online, or if the director has been flagged for express service due to a record of error-free submissions, rating data will be processed within a few minutes of receipt, and transferred to our sister site cross-tables.com within an hour. In extreme cases, there might be a delay of as much 24 hours in processing ratings; whenever such delays can be anticipated, the directors involved will be individually warned by email.

The NSA’s late fee of $0.25 per person for events whose data is not received within two weeks of the last date of an event is no longer in effect. Instead, the director who is responsible for submitting an event’s data will be warned by email if that data has not been correctly submitted within two weeks of the end of the event; if the situation still persists another two weeks later, the director’s certification will be downgraded by one step: full to apprentice, or apprentice to uncertified.

Prompt payment is expected for all outstanding fees. Overdue accounts will be charged a 2% penalty per calendar month; membership will be suspended if payment is not received in full within three months; such suspended memberships will only be reinstated when payment is made in full including penalties. Directors with an overdue account may not post future events to the tournament calendar.

Directors should not interpret the two week’s grace period before the first warning as a suggestion that they ought to wait this long before submitting data.

Errors

The current design of the rating system relies on directors to correctly submit data. In particular, if a director incorrectly labels tournament data, so that it gets rated for the wrong day or in the wrong rating system, it can take up to half an hour of staff time to correct.

Accordingly, a director’s rating data submission privilege can be

1. automatic (express processing immediately without human review),
2. manual (always held for human review), or
3. probationary (express processing immediately without review, but more easily reverting to manual status on error).

For the purpose of this system, we define terms as follows:

• an event is a series of tournaments held consecutively or concurrently with gaps of no more than a day
• a director is the person who is assigned rating data submission responsibility for an event
• a major error is one in which data is submitted with the wrong date or rating system.
• a minor error is one in which data is submitted with the correct date and rating system, but one or more items of game data such as player names, pairings, scores or firsts/seconds are incorrect.

All directors begin their careers with automatic privilege.

A director with automatic privilege will be assigned to manual privilege if any of the following occur:

• the director has two consecutive events with major errors
• the director has three consecutive events with minor errors
• the director has three events with major errors within five years
• the director has five events with minor errors within five years

A director with manual privilege will be assigned to probationary privilege if any of the following occur:

• their most recent twenty events were submitted with no major errors and no more than one minor error.
• at least one year elapses since their last major error, and their most recent ten events were submitted with no major errors and no more than one minor error.
• at least two years elapse since their last major error, and their most recent four events were submitted with no major errors and no more than one minor error.

A director with manual or probationary privilege will be assigned back to automatic privilege if any of the following occur:

• no major or minor errors within five years, and their most recent five events were submitted with no major or minor errors.

A director with probationary privilege will be assigned back to manual privilege if any of the following occur:

• the director commits a major error.
• the director has four consecutive events with two minor errors.

To report an error (whether you are a player or tournament director), please email us at info@scrabbleplayers.org giving as much detail as possible, including the name of the event, its date, and the nature of the error. If it was a scoring error (and bearing in mind that the Rules limit what kinds of errors can be corrected at this point), indicate the names of the players involved, the erroneously reported score, and the correct score. Errors reported by the TD will be accepted without further corroboration; errors reported by a player will be verified with the TD.

Links

• NASPA tournament data submission application
• NASPA member services (payment of invoices)
• Submitting WESPA rating data